Novelty seeking personality trait

Definition

Human personality traits that can be reliably measured by rating scales show a considerable heritable component. One such instrument is the tridimensional personality questionnaire (TPQ), which was designed by Cloninger et al. (1993) to measure 4 distinct domains of temperament--novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence--that are hypothesized to be based on distinct neurochemical and genetic substrates.
Risk-taking is a characteristic of behaviors that occur under conditions of uncertainty and involves a tradeoff between beneficial versus detrimental outcomes, perceived or real. Risk-taking may or may not involve conscious evaluation of the probability and magnitude of possible outcomes (Anokhin et al., 2009).
See also harm avoidance (see 607834) and pathologic gambling (606349), which may be related. [from OMIM]